I have finally managed to replicate myself in digital form. My online alter ego suffers from a profoundly limited vocabulary and poor reading comprehension—but it’s still a start.

Credit for this feat of minor self-replication goes to an introductory course in building chatbots that can engage in basic conversations with strangers. That came at the Future.Today summit, a conference happening this week in New York. I may be nowhere near outsourcing my correspondence to a stack of algorithms, but at least I have a slightly better understanding of how these things work—and how I might want to put them to work for me.

Bots for beginners

I had the unfair advantage of getting somebody else to do the hardest work upfront: John Keefe, data journalist with WNYC radio, set up a bot engine using such web tools as Twilio’s (.